Torture for the masses

The shock-artists Jake and Dinos Chapman believe the public should be 'means tested' for intellectual suitability before being allowed to see their new show. Emily Bearn meets the brothers grim

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Brothers in arts: Jake [left] and Dinos Chapman

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Dark vision: Hell, by Jake and Dinos Chapman, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy's Apocalypse exhibition

By Emily Bearn

12:01AM GMT 29 Oct 2002

Over the years, the work of Dinos and Jake Chapman has caused some bewilderment. Take F---ing Hell, a compilation of 30,000 mutilated plastic soldiers arranged in the shape of a giant swastika (the centrepiece of the Royal Academy's Apocalypse show).

Then there was the set of life-sized nude mannequins with sexual organs for faces; and the three-dimensional version of Goya's Disasters of War, which included multiple decapitations and manglings. The brothers' contribution to the opening exhibition of the Tate Modern at Bankside, on the other hand, depicted a hammer through a brain, connected to a limp male organ. (The Queen was gently steered away from it at the official opening.)

They deny that their intention is to shock, but their work resonates with a clear desire to do so. And - in an industry in which a lot of people are struggling to do the same thing - it's paid off. Sylvester Stallone is a fan; Charles Saatchi paid £500,000 for F---ing Hell; they are represented by the unimpeachably fashionable London gallery, White Cube - a new show opens this week - and, over the past 10 years, they have gained enough column inches to make a giant papier-mache penis.

Their profile has been bolstered by a reputation for volatility (Jake was once evicted from the Groucho Club for behaving in a "threatening and intimidating manner") and, before meeting them, one of their representatives at White Cube cautioned me that they are terribly sensitive.

I am not to write about any of their new work, as they do not want to foster "pre-conceptualised" ideas about their new exhibition - billed as "an extraordinary assemblage of rare ethnographic fetish objects . . . including trophies from the former colonial regions of Camgib, Seirf and Ekoc". (Spell them out backwards: most amusing.).

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We have arranged to meet at 2 o'clock at their studio in east London. They are not there. Someone from a neighbouring studio eventually tracks them down on their mobile telephone, and I am instructed to turn left and go to "the cafe on the corner". There is no cafe on the corner, so I return to the studio and find them outside on the pavement.

I get the feeling that they would just as soon I hadn't found them at all. For though polite, they seem nervous, almost reticent. Both are handsome, though Dinos - who is dressed in goofy black glasses and camouflage combat trousers rolled up to his knees - looks sweeter. (At 40, he is the elder by five years.)

Their voices are almost identical (both are well-spoken), but Dinos points out that I can distinguish them on tape by the fact that "Jake will talk and I won't". They are in fact both verbose, though Jake is more so. For every word Dinos talks, he probably speaks 100, most of them many-syllabled and all of them disgorged with such fluent rapidity that you wonder how his tongue can keep pace with his brain. (Or vice versa.) It is all, loosely speaking, about art, and much sounds like babble.

Here, for example, is how they describe one of their works: "Drawing upon Munch's famous existential image of the screaming man, this digital design is the iconic residue of humanity after science and technology has had its wicked way: a multi-nucleated progeriac, an inflamed encephalitic Cartesian organ fighting for survival in an increasingly hostile, non-organic world."

We are sitting on high stools in their cavernous, freezing studio, surrounded by discarded gas heaters, empty Snapple bottles, bits of bicycle, slices of tree trunk and enough indistinguishable-looking rubble to fill a scrapyard. As Jake points out, any of it could be a work of art. Most of it looks like rubbish. A collection of finished work (the content of their forthcoming show) is visible through a door, but, as they remind me four times, I'm not to mention it.

On the table next to us is a work in progress, upon which I am allowed to comment. It consists of mutilated human figures, some of them hanging, some of them in what look like torture devices, all contained within a church (possibly gothic), which is shaped like a swastika. "It's about petrified death and dead religion," explains Jake. "We've always been religiously childish. We still are."

Any discussion of their work is difficult, as they dismiss most of my questions as "reductive", "not mystical" or "inappropriate". They clearly have little esteem for their audience, and have suggested the public should be "means tested" for intellectual suitability to view their work: "Galleries should not seek to be redemptible spaces for bourgeois people to pay their dues to culture," explains Jake. "Some people need to be alienated."

He denies, however, that their intention is simply to make people recoil: "Nothing in a gallery is repulsive. There should not be an assumption that art should idealise people's lives. Some people might have problems with a composition of genitalia, but sometimes shock is merely a Pavlovian response."

"We're not irreverent," adds Dinos. "Our work is only irreverent in that it allows certain people a little frisson."

In some of their work the artistic merit is elusive. The giant glass-fibre sculpture of Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair, balancing on the edge of a cliff, the mock Bible filled with images of sexual organs, and a video depicting one woman pleasuring another with the penis-nose of a beheaded dummy, all spring to mind.

They are, however, skilled draughtsmen, as evidenced in Disasters of War, a recently published book containing 83 of their hand-painted etchings, which were inspired by Goya's prints of the same title (the book is a highlight of this weekend's Artists Book Fair at the London Institute).

Each image is executed in painstaking detail, and most are fairly arresting: one picture features a cluster of bodies, beneath the caption: "Look. 36 penises, 16 vaginas, 6 anuses. It must be a girl!"; another shows a penis-like finger gouging an eye, while a few pages on you find a large insect balanced on a testicle and a man gorging on a human limb.

The etchings were made in 1999 and quickly sold out. Priced at £15,000, complete sets in black-and-white were bought by institutions such as the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Wherever their inspiration lies, it does not seem to be in art. They cannot name a painter they like, and appear to hold most in disdain: Francis Bacon's work is "retarded 1950s English existentialism"; Freud's is a "drab kitchen-sink drama"; the National Gallery is "full of rubbish" except, perhaps, for the Goyas, which are "quite good for a deaf Spanishman".

They are childishly irreverent - the Prime Minister is "a fascist"; Simon Rattle is a "twat". It's good for publicity, and publicity is part of the game: "The domain of making art has seeped into all forms of the media," explains Jake, kicking at his bar stool.

"The manipulation of the press is an expansive domain of the work of art. A work of art doesn't end at the door of the gallery. To be an artist in the 21st century you have to be aware that the 21st century is about informatics."

The brothers' enthusiasm for information has limits: they deflect personal questions with convoluted art-speak. Their father was an art teacher, their mother an orthodox Greek Cypriot; they were brought up in Cheltenham; moved to Hastings where they attended a local comprehensive; enrolled at the Royal College of Art ("shit", "a complete waste of time" and "full of people tickling oil paint around"); and started working together soon after graduating.

"We're not joined at the hip," explains Jake. "Our lives are very different. We didn't merge our work because we were brothers. We did it because our ideas converged." They say they would consider going their own ways only "if things get boring".

For the moment, they appear settled. Dinos lives with a textile designer and has two children who "play an active part in taking on the misanthropic lineage"; Jake has a girlfriend; and both remain resolutely loyal to each other: "I make my work for Dinos and Dinos makes his for me," explains Jake.

"That's right," says Dinos. "We work for each other." They have a wider audience and - though they can charge upwards of £30,000 for one piece - are airily dismissive about money: "We are not idealistic about the world," says Jake. "It's a shitty place in which capitalism and the production of art are not separated."

The Chapman brothers seem almost overwhelmingly arrogant - after an hour in their company you long to stick a pin in them to see if they'll deflate. But beneath all the bravado, they give the impression of being rather shy.

They thrive on publicity but, the more they get, the more elusive they become: "People sometimes confuse us with the work, but no work of art has ever been personal," says Jake. "We are allergic to the idea that art is a manifestation of personality."

"That's right," adds Dinos. "It's not that we don't have emotions; it's just that we don't think people would be interested in them." Instead, they have set out to interest people in mutated plastic figurines. And the fact that they have succeeded says more about the vagaries of our art market than it does about the Chapman brothers.

Works from the Chapman Family Collection opens at White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 on Thursday and runs to December 7.